The Living Word, Beheld

While reading Hermann Hesse’s “The Living Word” (from Seasons of the Soul), I was struck by a quiet and enduring truth: that the Word, however sacred, however beautiful, is never meant to be held at a distance. It must be lived, or it loses its life within us.

His poem does not argue this, it simply reminds. And in that reminder, something in me answered: What happens when truth is no longer contemplated, but encountered, when it is no longer spoken, but beheld?

I found myself returning to a poem I had written some time ago, and I now read it differently:

When Truth and I Behold Each Other

When Truth and I behold each other,
my heart pulsates to the tempo of the soft-
spoken mist of rain that tiptoes
after the last bellow of the drunken
thunder has been silenced —

I forget this leavened flesh,
I am no longer
a tree walking
in my tannin espadrilles,
the alabaster egrets carry
my gesturing branches
across the turquoise oceans —

I am left with my eyes
sown in the meadow of the galaxies,
primordial light-years turn transparent
corneal sheaths
into the sun’s corona —

the brilliance is beyond diamonds.

— D. G. Vachal

Perhaps this is one way of receiving the “living word” — not as something we hold, but as something that overtakes us, reshapes us, and carries us beyond ourselves.